One of my dearest net friends is Kikei, who is Muslim. However, it is my view that, although we are not necessarily fighting Muslims, we are certainly fighting Islam. I think that those people who, like Kikei, do not believe that Islam entails war, are good human beings, but not necessarily good Muslims. They read their own noble moral instincts in their religion and imagine that they are getting them from it, when in fact they are taking them to it. To remove jihad from Islam would entail rewriting or editing out about one-fifth of the Qur'an and disregarding the example of Muhammad, who fought several dozen wars in his lifetime; neither can be done without ripping the heart of the religion out. Many people want to do it, or else do it without thinking about it, but I think that when they do that they are moving away from what Islam really is - which is a religion with a political message and a code of laws to impose - into a kind of bland Unitarianism, morally exemplary, of course, but without the anger and titanism and fire of real Islam, and therefore bound to lose.
I'm not sure if I agree with that, given what I know about my friends and their beliefs, but I won't argue since I am not well-informed on the subject. There are, of course, some people who think that all religion entails violence and "convert everyone else to our way of thinking or destroy them". Not a view I agree with but... sigh. These arguments make me feel exhausted before I've even had them.
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Date: 2005-07-08 10:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-08 11:07 am (UTC)